The feed of updates to benlog
Emzie Wilder and his daughter Shedonna Wilder-Martin stand outside his home in Shreveport, Louisiana. Photo by Ben Greenberg. In 1965, Emzie Wilder’s brother, John Wesley Wilder, was shot and killed by police officer Edward Alton Nugent in Ruston, Louisiana. Today Emzie is 92 years old, living in Shreveport, Louisiana. I’ve spoken with Emzie and his daughter Shedonna Wilder-Martin for “ A Death…
From left to right, Shirley Walker Wright, Clifton Walker, Jr. and Catherine Walker Jones stand in the middle of Poor House Road, where their father was murdered in 1964. Photo by Ben Greenberg Near midnight on February 28, 1964, a mob of whites ambushed Clifton Earl Walker, Jr. on a dirt road in Southwest Mississippi. They stopped his car, gathered around it with shotguns and fired in at close…
I'm pretty happy with how my Mastodon posts get sent to my # blog via # IFTTT and # RSS . The one last thing I'm trying to resolve is getting the right timestamp to appear as the post's filename in # dropbox . This involves a code filter on IFTTT and me pretending I know anything about # java . -xpost Reply on Mastodon
It's been years since I've spent this much time messing around with my social media presence and nerdy internet tools. I guess that says something for Mastodon. -xpost Reply on Mastodon
Catherine Walker Jones and Shirley Walker Wright hold a picture of their father, Clifton Walker, and stand on Poor House Road, where he was killed. Photo by Ben Greenberg 58 years ago today, on February 28, 1964, a white mob ambushed and murdered Clifton Earl Walker, Sr. on Poor House Road, outside Woodville, Miss. The murder is thought to be the first organized shooting of an African American by…
The David Byrne concert in Boston on Tuesday night was as great or greater than any fan (and I am a big fan) would expect. But another great thing about the concert was being exposed to the music of Benjamin Clementine, who opened up for Byrne.
Supreme Court Upholds Ohio’s Purge of Voting Rolls ( New York Times ) A Reuters study in 2016 found that at least 144,000 people were removed from the voting rolls in recent years in Ohio’s three largest counties, which are home to Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus. “ Voters have been struck from the rolls in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods at roughly twice the rate as in Republican…
I had the honor of speaking in March at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice on the police killings of Army Cpl. Roman Ducksworth, Jr. in 1962 and Michael Brown, Jr. in 2014. The video of the talk is now online.
Oakland passes groundbreaking municipal law requiring citizen oversight of local surveillance / Boing Boing Oakland City Council unanimously passed the city’s “ Rules for Surveillance”, the country’s most stringent police surveillance oversight law. The law provides for a “ Privacy Advisory Commission” and directs police to produce an annual report with fine-grained details of how surveillance…
New Federal Prison Policies May Put Books and Email on Ice (In Justice Today) Now, prisoners instead will have to submit a request to purchase books — a limit of five per order — through an ordering system in which they must pay exorbitant prices and don’t have the option to buy cheaper used paperbacks. In addition, prisoners must pay a 30 percent tax plus shipping cost, according to prisoners and…
Eluvium, Prelude for Time Feelers
Muckrock | Until recently, police in Columbus, Ohio couldn’t differentiate between rape kits and shopping carts A perfect example of what @mey621 and @heathermarlowe have been saying, here quoting University of Kansas law professor Corey Rayburn Yung : Backlog “ implies that the untested rape kits were in a queue awaiting testing by overburdened labs…. That does not reflect the reality across the…
In Louisiana, Threatening to File a Complaint Against Police Can Lead to a Five-Year Prison Sentence “ I’m calling your supervisor,” Aubin said. “ I’m gonna get you fired.” Aubin took out his cell phone, called the sheriff’s department, and started walking back towards his house. But before he made it inside, Durkin arrested him. The charge: intimidation of a public official — a felony that in…
And… it worked. The idea is to move a lot of my more casual web posts out of the walled gardens of FB and Twitter and back onto the open web. Cf. Manton Reece, Why I Created Micro.blog and Dan Cohen, Back to the Blog
If I did this right, this post to benlog.net will also hit my microblog (micro.blog/minorjive) and my Twitter and Facebook feeds.
I have a piece over at NPR Code Switch today , about the 1962 police slaying of black Army Cpl. Roman Ducksworth, Jr. in Taylorsville, Miss. Roman Ducksworth in uniform. The Army Corporal was shot to death by a white Mississippi police officer in 1962. (Courtesy of Cordero Ducksworth and the Syracuse Cold Case Justice Initiative) My article tells the story of the slaying and of its lasting effects…
Still from 1933 film of Louis Armstrong in Copenhagen, Denmark. Now I have one radio-phonograph; I plan to have five. There is a certain acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing “ What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue”—all at the same time.…
POlICE BRUTALITY Mississippi 1957-65, NAACP Records, Library of Congress I received a statement and fact sheet from US Representative John Lewis announcing the introduction on Tuesday of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Reauthorization Act . Congress passed the original Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act legislation in 2007 to bring about a “ sustained, well-coordinated, and…
( Note : On the occasion of Billie Holiday’s 100th birthday, I present this short story by my father. In his 30s and then in his 60s, my father made some forays into autobiographical writing. I’ve published other pieces previously, on my other blog . This story, set in the mid-1940s, was written around 1993. My father prefaced a collection of this and other pieces with a disclaimer: “ The…
On Thursday, the United Nations human rights council heard evidence concerning the US failure to investigate and punish racial murders from the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Al Jazeera America news anchor John Seigenthaler discussed the development with me on his Friday evening show. According to The Guardian lawyers and human rights experts for the Syracuse University Cold Case Justice Initiative brought…
My letter responding to this was published in today’s New York Times . To the Editor: The report on lynching is a deeply needed review of the legacy of racial terror in American life. But the truth and reconciliation called for in the Equal Justice Initiative report is also needed for the scores of racially motivated extrajudicial killings and other acts of racial terror during the civil rights…
Lyndon Johnson was president—the executive branch of the federal government. It was his job to enforce the law. He should not have waited until Jimmie Lee Jackson’s, James Reeb’s and Viola Liuzzo’s lives were taken. He should not have waited until people were beaten and bloodied on Pettus Bridge before he enforced Negroes’ right to vote in the South. I appreciate LBJ ’ s enacting and signing the…
DeKalb County, Alabama superintendent of schools Hugh Taylor has nixed the Collinsville High School history club’s request to take students to a screening of Selma in nearby Gadsden. Taylor’s objection to students making a school sanctioned and funded trip to see the film has gotten people talking about new South discomfort with frank representations of old South realities. More is at stake here,…
Letter from Paul Greenberg to Esther Greenberg, Sept. 28, 1951 (excerpt) In this letter, we return to Sasebo, Japan in September of 1951 , where my father was recovering from a massive case of dysentery. He is about to be sent back to Korea, possibly again to the front lines, and he shares his fears with my mother. My parents married secretly in the fall of 1950, after my father finished basic…
Letter from Paul Greenberg to Esther Greenberg, March 20, 1951 (excerpt) My father had already seen months of combat in Korea by this March train ride through the Japanese countryside. Within a matter of days, as his letters reflect, he would be back to combat in Korea. I have not yet found a letter that gives context to this stint in Japan, to where he’d return in September, to recuperate from…
Letter from Paul Greenberg to Esther Greenberg, April 2, 1951 (excerpt) This letter is quite a glimpse into the complexities of my father’s wartime experience. It is reassuring and moving to witness his horror at the eviction of a Korean family from their home so that it can be turned over to his troop as a place to stay. I like how he uses his discomfiting access to the evicted family’s home to…
Artwork by @MollyCrabapple
The Daily Show’s Jessica Williams investigates Detroit’s aggressive water shutoffs, which targets many of the city’s poorest residents while leaving large commercial properties unscathed.
Letter from Paul Greenberg to Esther Greenberg, Sept. 23, 1951 (excerpt) After close to a year of combat in Korea in September 1951, my father contracted dysentery and was sent for treatment at a military hospital in Sasebo, Japan. He wrote this letter to my mother from the hospital in Sasebo. 23 Sept. 1951 Sasebo, Japan Dearest Esther, Two more ships left the harbor this morning. Two more ships.…
The American Psychological Association has announced that it will conduct an indepenedent review of its role in US torture during the Bush administration. James Risen reports for the New York Times : The nation’s largest organization of psychologists will conduct an independent review into whether it colluded with or supported the government’s use of torture in the interrogation of prisoners…
The current F.B.I. director, James Comey, keeps a copy of the King wiretap request on his desk as a reminder of the bureau’s capacity to do wrong. But elsewhere in Washington, the debate over how much the government should know about our private lives has never been more heated: Should intelligence agencies be able to sweep our email, read our texts, track our phone calls, locate us by GPS? Much…